


How Not to Make a Species

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Developing Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-16
Updated: 2013-06-16
Packaged: 2017-12-15 03:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/844954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability." - Oscar Wilde</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Not to Make a Species

**Author's Note:**

> Done for HSWC bonus round one! Not edited too well so if you see any errors, feel free to point them out. Written during the hiatus, so it only complies to the canon before that.

 

The first time you see him it’s nothing but black.

 

An obsidian blindfold to hide yourself away from the black, black void that surrounds you. Something to focus on. He’s small and pink with blue eyes like almonds behind thick, rectangular glasses and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever laid eyes on.

 

They’re weak, humans. Instead of lusii they just have larger humans who teach them how to be as boring, pathetic, and nonfunctional as they are. They coddle and cry and laugh and bake and make music and sit around and consume consume consume. Always searching and learning and failing. It seems like he goes out of his way to find hobbies that are completely incompatible with his personality. He tries so many things and he keeps trying and he smiles even when he fails because he’s having ‘fun’.

 

You can’t wait, you think, for him to taste real failure. The kind where there are consequences besides a pat on the head and a hug from his man lusus.

 

He’s going to lose everything, just like you have, but the one upside is that you get to watch.

 

* * *

 

You watch.

 

Could they have really screwed up that badly?

 

Could you have really screwed up that badly?

 

All you can do is watch as he blindly leads his friends-but-not-enemies-somehow down the path you know he’s going to take but that won’t stop you from yelling. Nothing could ever really stop you from yelling, in retrospect. One miserable foot in front of the other, slowly leading your universe, their universe, the entire sum of every accomplishment you’ve ever managed to scrape up, right down the fucking drain.

 

In retrospect you really should have planned for managing to create a universe even shittier than the one you came from. Considering the way your entire life up to that point had gone, it was uncharacteristically optimistic to think your ultimate reward could be something worth wanting.

 

A brand new universe. A brand new start. You could be gods, you could be anybody you wanted. You could be you and it wouldn’t even fucking matter because you were breeding a new universe for fuck’s sake.

 

There wasn’t much time for talking during frog breeding, especially with the way you rushed it (fuckfuckwhydid you do that why whyw hy wrong stupid mistakesyourfaultyourfault) so you had a lot of time to think.

 

What kind of a universe would you make?

 

Would there be trolls? Would there be aliens? Would it be paradise, utopia? A barren wasteland? Would there be peace, or would they breed their young for war? Two legs or four leds, mammalian, reptilian, planets made of glass and stars that glowed green or blue and it was at that moment you truly understood the true meaning of the word ‘possibility’.

 

Maybe, you had thought, there was a little bit of beauty to be squeezed out of the little shred of yourself you had managed to keep intact.

 

Instead, you got John.

 

You click back a few minutes on Jade’s timeline for the umpteenth time and watch everything go to shit again and again and again.

 

* * *

 

The more you talk to John the more bearable he becomes, and the less bearable you become to him. Replace John’s name in the previous statement with the name of everyone you’ve ever met and it’s a pretty accurate synopsis of your life.

 

The wonderful thing about your ‘relationship’ with John is that it’s completely of your own making. You came on too strong, too fast too late, and fucked it up and now you’ve conned yourself into stumbling backwards into a mess where you know more and more but somehow less and less when everyone else is going forward. Typical.

 

You still make sure to remind him of how much he fucked up. It was their fault, really, the prototyping. Sure, your frog had looked a little bit under the weather but that couldn’t be the problem because one small little thing can’t ruin a whole universe you can’t have ruined a whole universe it can’t be your fault what happens and even if it was you don’t care can’t care won’t care he starts being nice to you and you don't understand why none of them will take their deaths with dignity there’s no hope and you’ve all just fuck up so badly why won’t it stop why couldn’t you have been smarter been better you-

 

You tell John things you’ve told him so many times before and you keep going backwards.

 

* * *

 

It’s hopeless. Their entire universe is a wreck, a ticking time bomb and the clock’s been counting down since the beginning of comprehensible time, right down to the next moments. He keeps trying. They all keep acting like there’s something among the rubble left to save when in the end it’s just them and the nooses around their necks as the ground beneath their feet threatens to drop.

 

They’re the only things left but you guess saving each other must really mean a lot to them.

 

You’d be this stupid to save your friends, you think, but this is just another way in which you fail to live up to even the most meagre expectations because you know they wouldn’t fight like that for you and looking out for someone else just means you can’t watch your own back.

 

It’s different on the Human Earth. They can afford to be kind and different.

 

They all keep trying.

 

* * *

 

He’s god tier now.

 

24 hours and a bit of advice from a girl on a computer on the other side of paradox space. 24 hours to reach the top of his echeladder, to do what took Vriska Serket (who you arent thinking about cobalt blue on her back and her front and stark contrast against the white and red of terezis cane) weeks to do. For someone whose main strategy is blindly stumbling through a field of cacti while barefoot and taking advice from anyone who opens their mouth to talk, he’s progressed insanely quickly.

 

He made it look effortless when it’s the hardest thing you ever did. You didn’t do half as well either.

 

He’s your friend now, you suppose. He thinks so for sure and you find yourself accepting it too but you shouldn’t think of him like that because Bad Things happen to your friends and you’re trying not to think about the bodies trying not to look at them fuschia and jade and yellow splattered on unforgiving grey, grey, grey like the mask you insist on wearing even now when you won’t live long enough for it to matter.

 

You’ll die like you lived: afraid and hiding.

 

You look at John through the viewport and he’s swathed in blue which is a color that suits him well because it’s a sort of soft and gentle color, that blue, and it’s like the sky and its the color of the waves in the ocean as they go about their merry way lapping at the sand like not a fucking thing could be wrong as your planet is pelted to submission with meteor after meteor.

 

He smiles a little bit and you don’t understand how.

 

He saw the corpse of his man-lusus, dumped on the cold, damp ground like a pile of trash. He saw that next to the body of a woman he never knew but she was a human and he was a human and there were only so many left.

 

He saw the body of a friend who was killed trying to avenge his own death, stabbed right through the heart after a humiliating display of revenge. He still doesn’t know that she’s alive.

 

He asks you.

 

You say yes, she’s fine (for now).

 

He smiles and you don’t understand.

 

He asks about what’s happening and you try to explain as much as you can but you’re not willing to address it yourself, the blood and the bodies and your friends killing and dying and you’re stuck in the middle trying not to scream your throat raw. He’s tactless in his approach, but he cares for some shitty, stupid reason you can’t even begin to understand.

 

He calls you his friend again and there’s a certain moment of clarity when you realize the implication behind the fact that humans have a completely different word for ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.

 

He offers to deliver The Tumor himself and you wonder if he’s really that stupid or reckless or brave but it’s probably just some sort of vile concoction of the three. Casual acts of heroism appear to be normal for humans though, because Dave and Rose already agreed to deliver the fucking bomb together even though there’s no point in both of them dying.

 

Dying with someone else would be nice, though.

 

You tell John he’s an idiot, and that bravery tends to go hand in hand with the courageous act of genuine martyrdom.

 

He tells you that he could just try and not act all that brave while doing it but that’s exactly the kind of thing a hero would say and to your surprise he agrees with you and lets out one of the more serious things you’ve heard him say.

 

EB: yeah.

EB: i just don't want to lose anybody else is all.

 

Me too, asshat.

 

You tell him that there’s no other choice and he offers to go help Jade with her problems and you’re forced to explain for the second time in five god damned minutes that BRAVERY = DEATH.

 

It’s not being brave for him, though, it’s not being heroic. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he should be doing anything other than helping his friends, like he was born with the self preservation switch in his head on the OFF setting.

 

He makes a joke about sloppy makeouts and you just can’t find it in your heart to tell him that she’s as dead as all of his friends are about to be. You lie through your teeth and even though you fought so much harder and lost so much more you feel a deep, surge of pity for the idiot.

 

You tell him you don’t hate him and you send him on his merry way to do what might be the last thing he ever does.

 

* * *

 

The bucket crashes into your face and you feel your psyche crumble like the shell of beetle under the unforgiving boot of His Honorable Tyranny himself. John’s letter is rambling and kind and written on the back of a crudely defaced poster.

 

* * *

 

Rose informs you of exactly how long you’re going to be stuck on that meteor and you start to wish you had died when it would have been convenient.

 

* * *

 

Three years is a long time and you learn a lot about humans. You learn about stupid things like Christmas and Halloween and pinatas and skydiving, curling and tap dancing and math class and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

 

You learn about war and bigotry and starvation and genocide and all of the things that humans seemed too placated to have.

 

You learn that in some aspects, humans are a lot stronger than you gave them credit for.

 

You also learn exactly what it’s like to watch a human break, and it’s different than it is in trolls, you think, because they don’t stretch themselves thinner and thinner and thinner until they snap they just tuck themselves away and slowly crumble away eroding one layer at a time.

 

Kanaya doesn’t spend time with you anymore, and you understand. Rose needs her more than you do right now and Rose needs to be helped more than she can offer it to others and Terezi and Gamzee are sneaking around behind your back and they think you don’t know but you do and if they had just told you you might actually have been begrudgingly okay with it but they didn’t and you’re not and Gamzee was a shitty moirail anyway.

 

Dave teaches you the true meaning of human friendship and you think you understand why it was so easy for John to act brave for them.

 

You talk about John and Jade some of the time but most of the time you don’t.

 

* * *

 

Jade’s there looking larger than life and black-grey like you saw on Rose a long time ago and that wasn’t a situation that ended well so you’re about to yell but then everything’s a flash of green light and then it isn’t but everything’s still green.

 

Grass.

 

This is fucking grass.

 

You hear a shout and everything is a swarm of motion around you and people are yelling and standing up. You see blue and then strong, strong arms are wrapped around you tightly. Your instinct is to flee, to fight, anything, because unfamiliar arms should not be wrapped around you like this but the way they’re wrapped around you isn’t a threatening kind of tight.

 

You look up and it’s blue blue blue eyes behind those stupid glasses and his lighter sort of skin that isn’t pink like it was when he was a wriggler - no - baby is what humans are. His face is less round than you remember it, much squarer and more angular now and you’re not sure if you’re remembering wrong or if adolescence can vary a lot in humans too. Dave and Rose pretty much stretched out like they were left on the rack for a bit too long but John is taller and broader and thicker and sturdy like you wouldn’t expect from the boy who is the wind.

 

He smiles at you like you haven’t had anyone smile at you in a really fucking long time. You wrap your arms around him and bury your face in his chest and don’t even care how ridiculous you look.

 

* * *

 

You’re wading through the candy-colored foliage that you’re pretty sure is giving you a migraine, and it’s silence, save for the crunching of your feet against the ground and a footstep or two of John’s every now and then. It’s just the two of you here. Alone on the entire planet. It starts to feel like too much space and every part of you just wants to curl up into a small little ball and wait for the universe to stop being so big, but you haven't quite reached that level of patheticness yet.

 

You look at John, because it’s easier on your eyes than the neon trees, pink and orange and retina-searingly yellow.

 

He walks in a bizarre way, like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders but still trying to stop himself from floating away. He doesn’t really smile unless he thinks you’re looking at him. He flies, mostly, but will come down hard on his feet and take a few steps before floating up again and you’re honestly not sure whether it’s out of necessity or some other unfathomable reason that only makes sense in his head.

 

You’ve gotten better at being friends with humans, and you know what emotions look like on someone trying to hide them, because after all that’s pretty much all the Derse twins did. John looks different. He doesn’t look like he’s trying to hide his sadness, it’s there plain and simple, but he looks like he’s trying to convince himself that he can just be happy if he tries hard enough.

 

His sadness isn’t like Dave’s or Rose’s in a lot of ways. From the way he talks, you don’t get the feeling that he’s just sad about the things that are happening. Things don’t really stick to John the way they stick to you, he sends his problems and bad feelings away on the wind, but your own problems are one thing. His compassion is what you once considered his achilles heel, the thing that would be his downfall in the end, but maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. A hero’s death is exactly how you’d want to see him go.

 

You still feel bad about making their universe so wrong, but the little selfish monster in the back of your head is glad that the fates were kind enough to allow you and John to exist in the same universe, even under these circumstances.

 

There’s a clearing in the trees and through it a house that looks exactly like John’s, exactly as hollow feeling and deserted as the rest of the planet and apparently you were wrong about humans because the look on John’s face is exactly what you’d refer to as ‘snapping’.

 

he collapses, knees on the ground hands on his knees and he shouts louder than anyone who wasn’t a god of breath could shout.

 

“HELLO!” he screams and it rips out of him like a monster tearing its way through the gates of hell and it breaks your heart. “IS ANYONE THERE!” His voice cracks and dies before he can even finish the sentence and the next noise to come out of him is a choking, heavy sob.

 

You bend down next to him and pull up on his hood slightly and you walk him over to the house so he can at least collapse against the wall with a bit of dignity instead.

 

He cries and you haven’t seen him cry like this before, soft and weak and empty, and you’ve seen what consists of the majority of his life.

 

John always seemed to get so much more accomplished when he had a clear idea of what he was supposed to to, but now, now there’s just nothing. No goals. Dead end. Game over. You don’t have skaia or the frog or the planets and Jade’s gone and there’s no one here in this desolate wasteland of the universe that was suppose to be your last hope.  

 

John lifts his head up and leans it back against the wall. He laughs, a dry sort of hearty chuckle.

 

“What do we do now, Karkat?” he sniffles. “What is there even left to do at this point?”

 

“I don’t have a fucking clue, sorry, I relinquished my leadership a long time ago so you can’t hold me responsible for any of this shit.”

 

“I don’t.”

 

And he shifts and puts his head in your lap and closes his eyes and sighs. You do the only thing you can think to do, probably as a result of spending the last sweep and a half suppressing any and all sexual urges, bending down and lightly bringing your lips to his.

 

Nothing, for a moment and then pressure. Human lips are soft too. Humans are soft and squishy on the inside and the outside, oh so weak physically and mentally but there’s something about them that makes them shine like the fucking sun in ways trolls can’t.

 

Humans are a mistake, the bastard child of your pride and incompetence, and the laughing stock of paradox space. A species designed for creativity, innovation, arts and culture and society, not fighting. Yet rules are rules and games are meant to be played, nothing can stop the gears of paradox space from turning out universe after universe at the expense of so many others.

 

Humans are really pretty worthless in the grand scheme of things.

 

Yet here’s one lying on your lap, kissing you back, despite every bad thing that’s happened to him because of you. He radiates positivity and standing next to him is like standing in the eye of a storm waiting for something big to happen, and he’s kissing you like he cares more about you than anyone ever has bothered to care for you ever, and that shouldn’t be something you need because a troll should be stronger than that, but is.

 

Humans are fragile creatures, dominated by their emotions. Essentially low-functioning computers inside bags of warm meat.

 

It doesn’t stop you from loving them anyway.

 


End file.
